For almost half a century, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration tracked the number of billion-dollar climate and weather disasters that occurred each year across the United States.
That work came to a halt when the Trump administration cut funding for the project last summer. But the nonprofit organization Climate Central has revived the database, with the help of former NOAA scientist Adam Smith.
Smith oversaw the database at NOAA for fifteen years. When the project moved to Climate Central, he went with it.
“This dataset was simply too important to stop being updated,” he told HPR.
Since 1980, the database has logged more than 400 events that together have caused damage totaling upwards of $3 trillion. It’s documented a disturbing trend: these major disasters, like droughts, hurricanes, flooding, and wildfires, are happening more often.
“Back in the 1980s, the United States would go roughly three months between billion-dollar disasters. In the last decade, it's closer to every three weeks,” Smith said.
While the rise in costly disasters is due to a number of factors, Smith said the “800-pound gorilla in the room” is climate change, which is supercharging the frequency and cost of extreme weather events.
Hawaiʻi’s billion-dollar disasters
Hawaiʻi has three entries in the database: Hurricane Iniki, which resulted in an estimated $7 billion in damage in today’s dollars; the Maui fires, which cost $6 billion; and the latest entry, from just this year, is the March Kona Lows, which cost $1 billion.
The state is still working to tally the losses from Hurricane Lala. The Hawaiʻi Emergency Management Agency told HPR that as of Aug. 31, it had assessed more than $83 million in damage to public infrastructure, with most of the destruction concentrated in Hawaiʻi County. The agency has also assessed damage for nearly 200 homes. Meanwhile, emergency officials are eyeing yet another hurricane that may put Hawaiʻi in harm’s way.
Smith said it’s still uncommon for a state to have more than one billion-dollar disaster in a single year — but it does happen, and he expects it will become increasingly common. These compound disasters, when one extreme event occurs on the heels of another, can exacerbate costs and lengthen recovery periods.
“It's chaos on top of more chaos. … It's kind of like throwing a rock in the pond. It creates another set of ripples, which everyone has to deal with,” he said.
